Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3 Read online

  CONFLICT

  The Expansion Series

  By

  Devon C. Ford

  COPYRIGHT

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Any names, characters, incidents and locations portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.

  Copyright © DHP Publishing 2018

  Devon C Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive and non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen or hard copy.

  No part of the text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, known or otherwise yet invented, without the express permission of Devon C Ford and DHP Publishing.

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  Cover design by Jamie Glover at:

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  “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”

  Bertrand Russell

  Prologue – Mars deep orbit

  “Comm, get me a fleet-wide channel,” Admiral Elias Dassiova said confidently, almost happily, as he leaned back into his throne-like command chair on the bridge of the carrier Indomitable.

  “Channel ready, Admiral,” the comm officer responsible for inter-fleet communications responded smoothly. Dassiova looked at the console beside his seat, a larger screen than was on his last flagship, the Venture, as per his request so that he didn’t have to squint at it or accept the laser eye-corrective surgery he would no doubt require soon.

  Just like my father used to be, he thought with a sharp stab of loss and regret, my eyes are fine, but my arms aren’t long enough to read the datapads. He stabbed a very deliberate finger onto the button to transmit.

  “Members of the Ninth Fleet,” he said, the sadness gone again in place of the happy excitement, “this is the Admiral.” He paused for effect, imagining the multitude of people under his command over the thirteen ships, stopping and looking up at the speakers his voice emanated from. “We are about to set course for the Centauri system, and be under no illusion that we will be fighting to take control of it. Our enemy there, the Va’alen, are a formidable foe and will test the new capabilities of our ships, our technology and our very personal resolve before we win this fight. I know you will all do your duty to the best of your abilities, and each and every one of you will go down in Earth’s history as the brave men and women who forged the way for humanity to expand into another system.”

  He paused again, cursing himself for having gone off-book already in the speech he had prepared. “We will succeed. Trust in your commanding officers, trust in your fellow seamen and soldiers, trust in me, and we will be victorious. Let’s get this done; Dassiova out.”

  He hit the button to end the transmission, feeling a little foolish and embarrassed to be addressing everyone, as he was still forcing himself to grow accustomed to leading so many, and rolled his shoulders before giving his next orders.

  “Sound general quarters,” he instructed, seeing the corresponding change in lighting as all non-essential personnel would be scurrying away to wait out the possible risks at the far end of their artificial wormhole jump. “Helm, plot us a course for beyond the Oort cloud. The rest of the fleet to follow at twenty-second intervals.”

  “Course laid in, Sir,” the helmsman of their massive carrier responded.

  “Instructions relayed fleet-wide, Admiral,” the comm officer reported. A ripple of emotion ran through the bridge, setting hairs on end as people shuddered at their controls. Dassiova fought the urge to rub at his forearms where the exposed skin showed the raised fuzz covering his lower limbs and turned slowly to look at the newest addition to his bridge crew. The lone Kuldar, Asha, seemed swamped by the flight suit bearing the embossed name of the fleet’s flagship. He had been assigned, much by his own insistence and that of his mate, who was their rather laid-back monarch and de facto leader. Sensing that he was under scrutiny, he turned to see the admiral scowling at him.

  “I am,” he said in hissing and hesitant English, “sorry.” Dassiova said nothing, but his body reacted as the emotion of nervous excitement so extreme that it took the breath away from the younger members of his crew faded into one of mild embarrassment. He rolled his neck slightly in place of telling off their alien ambassador. He’d found himself doing this, as Asha was like a curious child who asked what a thing did by pushing buttons, and had done it once too often when looking at the tactical station where the ship’s main weapons were controlled. He faced forward and was glad that his own strong emotions didn’t radiate out like their new allies’ did.

  “Initiate jump on my mark… Let’s make history. Jump.”

  ~

  Almost two light years from Earth, the black, empty space of an empty sector suddenly hosted a dull, soundless flash as the huge shape of the Indomitable rippled into appearance as if from nowhere. That was, as far as technical definitions went, pretty accurate. They had been nowhere, at least nowhere in conventional space and time, for a little over a minute as the fine-tuned device protruding ahead of their now quad-layered frontal shields resonated electromagnetic fields to fold space. This allowed for the gargantuan carrier and the eight heavily armed destroyers nestled into her huge hull to pass through the artificially created portal.

  Dassiova sat still in his chair and waited for the reports to come back; first from the helm to report that their jump was accurate to within a thousand kilometers, a vast improvement given their extensive experiments over the last few months in the far reaches of their home solar system. The next report was from the tactical officer watching the sector readouts, calling out the contact of another UN ship arriving a few thousand kilometers away. Dassiova nodded his understanding, waiting until all the names of the ships following his enormous contraption of interstellar war-like ducklings behind their mother appeared on the sensor display.

  Hammer. Venture. Cortez. Anvil. Vengeance. Ichi.

  “All fleet vessels present and accounted for, Admiral,” the comm officer reported, having received successful jump flash reports transmitted on the fleet comm band as soon as they arrived in the sector.

  “Outstanding,” Dassiova said, seeing the entire fleet on his display as a well-ordered and closely grouped array of symbols, “order all vessels to run full diagnostic reports and check in when they have the all-clear.”

  “Aye aye.”

  Protocols, Dassiova thought, even this far out we all still have to follow goddamned protocols.

  He knew the ships would be fine and in full battle-ready order as they had all tested their Fold Drives close enough to Mars to be able to limp home under sub-light speeds if something went wrong, but as this was their first operational fleet jump, the rules had to be followed.

  “Sir,” the comm officer called out, “Captain Halstead of the Vengeance reporting a surge in her Fold Drive emitter’s power supply.”

  “Signal the fleet for an all-stop,” he said, fighting back the urge to remind the officer manning his comm array that he was well aware of who captained which vessel, “conduct a training scenario for instant defense positions and ask Captain Halstead to use the time for a thorough diagnostic.”

  The orders were given, and the hours of fleet training paid off as Dassiova watched his little flock adopt the positions that the theoretical scenario called for. His own flagship, the Indomitable, so aptly named in his opinion, surged
ahead of the more vulnerable ships in the fleet, where the maneuvers of her eight limpet-like attachments were slick to the point of outright intimidating. The docked gun barges, four on each of the carrier’s sides, shed their clamps and fired their maneuvering repulsers at maximum to push their squat, space-tank-like hulls away before fanning out to form a front perimeter defense.

  Dassiova wasn’t a fan of the term ‘gun barge’ as he felt it made the separately crewed ships that formed a large part of his carrier’s capability for violence sound like little more than slow-moving barges. They weren’t quite cruisers. They certainly weren’t battleships like the Venture had been before she was retrofitted, and by no stretch of the imagination were they on a par with the agile and heavily-armed frigates, but he supposed there was at least some accuracy to the term attached to them. They were mobile artillery platforms capable of operating independently of their mothership for a few days at a time, and although they had no Fold Drive capability, they were practically dripping with ordnance and carried more shielding than the surface of their Moon.

  The carrier itself was bristling with the new alien technology cannons, mass-produced on Mars and fitted to every ship in threes where only one conventional weapon would have sat before, and she took point in that defensive line with enough fire power by herself to dominate the entire space-going fleet of Earth, even without the thick-hulled, grossly overpowered squad of gun barges that seemed to suckle from her teats. His screen refreshed, and he saw that the Ichi, their space-fleet’s version of a silent reconnaissance submarine back from Earth’s history, appeared further ahead to extend the range of their sensors. That ship, small and fast but well-armed and shrouded to make it invisible to the enemy, was the scalpel in comparison to his wrecking ball.

  To the flanks of their formation, facing outwards and slightly to the rear at the end of the line of the gun barges, came the two heavy frigates in the form of the newly built Norton’s Vengeance and the repaired and refitted Hammer. Captains Hayes and Halstead ran those ships and having seen their performances of their last foray into the Centauri system, nobody could doubt their bravery or abilities.

  Nestled in the center at the point of safety were the two most vulnerable ships of their flotilla: the repurposed Cortez and the newly-added Anvil. The Cortez, commanded by the ever-unhappy captain Wright, carried their main supplies. The Anvil was their mobile forge ship under the command of their Russian captain, Novak, and it had a vast section of its belly missing to allow for other ships to dock in deep space and for the bug shield arrays to encompass them for repairs.

  At the rear, turned side-on to show a full broadside and plug the gap, was the fleet’s former flagship, the Venture. She, like the Cortez, had been hastily but thoroughly repurposed to be a weapons platform to house the skeleton of a defensive space station. That repurposing was one of Dassiova’s main insistences, as he wholly believed that a series of more permanent bases was required to capture and hold the sector from the worryingly large number of Va’alen still stranded there.

  Dassiova’s gaze lingered on the Ichi, far out in front. Often overlooked in the fleet because of the size difference, the Bōken sha Ichi captained by Kyle Torres was a fine instrument and was the sole reason he was there in charge of the biggest, and most expensive fleet ever put together. The Ichi might be small, but her retrofitting had seen the addition of another, larger power source to feed the additional guns and increase the effectiveness of the Shroud, which had been further refined since it had allowed them to creep undetected far behind the enemy lines of the Va’alen to provide the critical intelligence used to destroy the gateway device that, as Dassiova had often said, “represented an infinite number of superior enemy reinforcements”. The constant ratification of his signing-off on that mission, one conducted and conceived by Torres and Halstead, was required as the paymasters on Earth were less than impressed at having a newly refurbished frigate used as a suicide bomber.

  “All ships report in position,” the comm officer said loudly, breaking the admiral’s bubble of a daydream, “all shields at maximum and all weapons systems ready.”

  “Outstanding,” Dassiova said again, wincing as he felt like a geography teacher for repeating the word that hadn’t even seemed natural to him when he’d declared it the first time.

  “And the Vengeance reports normal diagnostics; just a blip in their shield emitter which is all fixed.”

  “Good,” the admiral said, feeling that the new word he used seemed somehow inadequate after his over-use of outstanding, “signal the exercise over, dock our birds and plot the next jump.”

  “Coordinates, Admiral?” asked the newly transferred chief pilot, taken from the demoted Cortez where a man of his talent wouldn’t be required, as the ship was non-combatant.

  “Edge of the Centauri system, Mister Moon,” Dassiova said, “as soon as the destroyers are docked, punch it.”

  HYPeR Facility, Mars

  Six Months Earlier

  “I’m sorry, Doctor Paterson,” the black-uniformed private military contractor said woodenly as he barred the door to the research lab. “I can’t allow you access at this time.”

  “What time can you allow me access?” Paterson snapped back, reverting to aggressive sarcasm when all other avenues had failed him.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have that information.”

  “What information do you have?” Paterson asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have that information,” the guard repeated robotically.

  “You don’t know that you don’t know, mall cop?” Paterson goaded.

  “I know that I can’t allow you access at this time, Sir.”

  Paterson threw his arms up and walked away a few steps in exasperation. It was the third time that day he had tried to gain access to the Hyper labs where Specter had been taken as soon as they had docked after returning from the Centauri system. The damage he had sustained on their mission wasn’t catastrophic, but it had triggered either some kind of psychological disassociation or else had scrambled whatever reprogramming they had done to his former friend.

  Jake, or Specter, depending on who he woke up as, had saved their mission – as well as the lives of some very key personnel – but the secretive company that had invested in the almost dead trooper and rebuilt him over years to make him the incredible weapon he was had since erected an information blackout wall about the cyborg’s wellbeing.

  The door behind Paterson hissed open, making him drop his hands from his face and spin back around to face the open aperture. His expression dropped when he saw the short man who walked out. Ryan Levenstein, the company administrator who found himself swept up on the wild ride of their previous mission, walked out wearing a shirt and pants that seemed tailored and expensive.

  “Paterson,” he said dismissively in arrogant greeting, his voice alone serving to repulse the scientist.

  “He in there?” Paterson asked angrily.

  “I can’t confirm that,” Levenstein answered annoyingly.

  “Cut the shit,” Paterson snapped, “what can you confirm.”

  “I can confirm that our company asset is functioning properly, and if said asset was deployed again, it would be under more strict control measures by the company.”

  “So, he is okay, but you want to send one of your hacks with him next time?” Paterson demanded, his anger taking the credibility from his words.

  “However you want to interpret that, Paterson,” Levenstein answered with a corporate smirk.

  ~

  “The reason I have called you here is to remain between us only,” admiral Dassiova said as he glared at the assembled ship’s captains to be certain that his point was understood. “What I am about to say is, and will remain, classified.” A ripple of affirmations ran around the assembled officers, prompting him to go on.

  “Over the last month, we have found unauthorized communications from here to Earth,” he said, seeing a collection of eyebrows raise. “Whoever is doing
it is smart; they’re re-routing their transmissions through two or three of the ships remotely and sending encrypted data-burst only, which as you all know makes it goddammed hard to pinpoint their origins. We’ve tracked the origins,” he nodded to indicate Suranne Massey, his flight officer, “of these signals as far as possible, rotated out all of the encryption codes required to use the subspace comm arrays, and still are none the wiser as to who is sending home postcards without authority.” The room took on a fidgety feel, as though everyone present was shifting on the spot, in case it was any of their crew who was responsible. Finding the culprit among thousands was an almost impossible task.

  “Do we know where the signals are being received?” Captain Halstead asked.

  “No,” Massey answered for the admiral, “only that the burst transmissions have been directed at both the Lunar base and Earth. The trajectories aren’t recorded in the comm data logs – intentionally it seems – and every terminal that they have been run through is unmanned at the times they’ve been remotely hacked. Like the Admiral said, whoever is doing this is smart.”

  “Who have you had working on it?” Torres asked, thinking of using one of the best scientists they had, who just happened to be his friend and was now part of the Ichi’s crew after he had been dragged along when they were attacked at their Lunar base.

  “Very few people for now,” Dassiova said, “and all of those have been personally vetted by me.” His words brooked no recourse to investigate anyone already in the know. The admiral’s word was incontestable. “So, the plan is to create a new software protocol to actively monitor the arrays and record anything sent. Sure, it may be encrypted, but I bet that’s nothing we can’t break once we actually have some hard evidence.”